Catalan language in the heart of Barcelona

I come from a pub­lish­ing house. My fa­ther did every­thing in very dif­fi­cult times. No­body wanted to sell a book in Cata­lan. I was going to study at a school next to Ona, but I didn’t want to study, I wanted to paint. My fa­ther told me to work. And I fell in love with Ona and never wanted to leave. My vo­ca­tion came from falling in love with my coun­try. It was a very politi­cised book­shop and you had to adopt a po­si­tion, a bit like with the in­de­pen­dence process. In Gràcia, I was per­se­cuted, books were de­stroyed, para­mil­i­taries came and threat­ened me... There are peo­ple who get angry and in­sult me be­cause we only have books in Cata­lan.

I trained at Ona, it was like a book­shop school. It’s not like other book­sellers, al­though nei­ther bet­ter nor worse. We were born in a very com­pli­cated time, dur­ing the Franco dic­ta­tor­ship. En­ter­ing Ona, for me, was a great dis­cov­ery. They hadn’t told me any­thing about Pe­drolo, Cap­many, Roig... and all these au­thors were in Ona.

All book­shops take dif­fer­ent di­rec­tions, but in the end the con­nect­ing link is cus­tomer ser­vice. The Gran Via Ona had its way of work­ing, of treat­ing the cus­tomer that was very dif­fer­ent from what ex­isted then. We were old school, where the most im­por­tant thing was cus­tomer ser­vice. Then every­thing be­came com­put­erised and per­haps a lit­tle of that per­son­alised at­ten­tion was lost. The com­puter works great for many things, but not so much for oth­ers.

When Ona closed I worked in other book­shops and the con­cept was the op­po­site: 90% were books in Span­ish. There was only a small per­cent­age in Cata­lan. I don’t con­sider my­self bilin­gual. My lan­guage is Cata­lan, and that’s it. The sec­ond lan­guage I learned was Span­ish, just as it may have been Ital­ian. I think, feel and dream in Cata­lan. We have learned other lan­guages by im­po­si­tion. When I go to other book­shops I see this lack of pro­tec­tion of our lan­guage. It’s true that there are more new books in Span­ish, and per­haps this is why it’s the pri­or­ity. It’s not that I’m not in­ter­ested in the Span­ish lan­guage, I have a lot of books at home. But Cata­lan has a lot to offer. If we are to be a book­shop spe­cial­is­ing in Cata­lan, then we must do it well. We are al­ways under con­struc­tion, be­cause you can never have every­thing. There are many au­thors who lack a space and, lit­tle by lit­tle, they may be able to gain that space. I’m not in­ter­ested in giv­ing pri­or­ity to Span­ish. In fact, I don’t have enough space for all the Cata­lan books.

To­tally. It was one of the con­di­tions. What we’ve been able to do thanks to Tatxo is to have a good space for Cata­lan lit­er­a­ture trans­lated into many lan­guages. It was a short­com­ing in the coun­try. We have au­thors like Rodor­eda, Cabré... We have books trans­lated into Ital­ian, Eng­lish, Ger­man, Hun­gar­ian, Ser­bian, Sloven­ian, Nor­we­gian... This is some­thing a lot of peo­ple de­manded from us. It’s a for­eign sec­tion that I couldn’t have in the other Ona due to a lack of space and money.

It’s not a mat­ter of courage. It’s a mat­ter of sur­vival. We never imag­ined this would hap­pen. The staff struc­ture was not de­signed for a pan­demic. But we need to live with it. And I’m lucky to have Tatxo be­cause fi­nan­cially this is ti­tanic. Let’s not fool our­selves, from rais­ing the shut­ter, it’s all ex­penses. Un­for­tu­nately, peo­ple find it dif­fi­cult to spend money on books. There may have been a resur­gence, but things con­tinue to be up and down. You sell a lot for Christ­mas and Sant Jordi’s Day and then we have to live through a dry patch. Our sec­tor has al­ways been de­pen­dent on par­tic­u­lar mo­ments in the year.